Peachtree Cafe at Lane Southern Orchards, Ft. Valley GA

We are achingly close to a full set of the Georgia restaurants reviewed at Roadfood.com. One on their list had long confused me a little about when best to stop by for a visit. It’s Lane Southern Orchards, a gigantic agribusiness about fifteen miles south of Macon near the town of Fort Valley. I wasn’t entirely sure what would be good to eat here other than fresh peaches. Turns out that they do have a cafeteria, so we just needed to wait for a trip down to the coast to visit Marie’s mother and her father that coincided with our state’s peach season, and we could mark it off our list. Continue reading “Peachtree Cafe at Lane Southern Orchards, Ft. Valley GA” →

Delia’s Chicken Sausage Stand, Atlanta GA

When Marie and our friend Victoria were each in the later stages of their respective pregnancies, we met up near their new apartment in the East Atlanta neighborhood for ice cream at Morelli’s, and resolved to get together again after our babies were born. Victoria and James were raving then about Delia’s Chicken Sausage Stand, a collaboration between Delia Champion, who started our city’s much-loved Flying Biscuit Cafe, and Molly Gunn, who I understand co-owns The Porter. Weeks went by, babies were born and I started getting impatient about when the heck we were going to get together so’s I could try one of these dogs. Or slingers, as the restaurant would like to term them.

Make no mistake, though. These may be called slingers or chicken sausages, but they are definitely from the same mold as hot dogs. This is a good thing, as Marie and I certainly love good hot dogs. The new take on them here is incredibly neat and fun and very tasty. Champion and Gunn are using buns baked by the popular Holeman & Finch and locally-sourced, organically-grown chickens for their meat. The results are just a little different from even the best hot dog places in town – America’s Top Dog, Barker’s, Brandi’s – and make for a very interesting and unique taste. Plus, they’re open absurdly late. Like four in the morning late. If I lived in that neighborhood, they’d be seeing me pretty frequently in the middle of the night!

The one thing about Delia’s that does not please me is the lack of seating. There’s only a small indoor area with air conditioning to place orders, and six picnic tables outside to eat. As Atlanta enters its utterly miserable summer, this is going to keep us from paying them another visit for a few months. This is a real shame, because the food is quite wonderful.

Acting like I had not eaten anything in a month, I ordered both a Naked Slinger – far from naked, it was the sausage with their “comeback” sauce and a little of the firey five-pepper mustard – and their signature Hot Mess, a slinger buried under melted cheese, chili and jalapenos. This really is too messy a thing to eat in polite company, but somehow I avoided spilling any of it on Victoria and James’s couch.

Honestly, though, the sausage is so good that it doesn’t need all the crazy toppings. I really preferred the Naked Slinger, and thought that the meat’s flavor was really brought out by the mustard. Meanwhile, my daughter enjoyed eating the chicken as traditional sliders, and Marie had the Italian Stallion, which has the slinger served with onions, peppers, mozzarella and marinara sauce. Everything was really quite excellent.

I just amused myself, wondering whether the slinger could turn into an iconic Atlanta variety of dog, just like half-smokes are in Washington. I wish I had a TARDIS so I could pop forward a few decades and check that out.

Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken, Rock Hill SC

So the first three meals on our day trip through the Carolinas had been, one after another, each better than the one before. Something had to give, and it did. When I looked over the map, it looked like the only population center of note between Columbia and Charlotte on I-77 was the town of Rock Hill. I looked over South Carolina’s listing on Roadfood.com to see whether they suggested anyplace worth stopping in that town, and found a chicken place called Lee’s. I penciled that in and moved on, not realizing until later that the place was not quite what I thought I would find at Roadfood.com. Continue reading “Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken, Rock Hill SC” →

Guthrie’s, Dunwoody GA (CLOSED)

Now here’s a restaurant with an uphill battle. Guthrie’s has been around since 1965, and the formula that we know them by – limited menu, incredibly tasty sauce – was finalized in 1982. They have a strong claim to being the place that invented and perfected the chicken finger restaurant formula, yet somehow they’ve been completely passed in the market by one of their imitators, Zaxby’s. Now, Zaxby’s isn’t bad, and we’ve been known to stop in many times over the years, but when I first discovered a Zaxby’s in the nearby town of Watkinsville, I described it to all my Athens friends as “kind of like Guthrie’s, but with more stuff.”

Guthrie’s couldn’t have had much less stuff at all. The menu consists of really incredibly amazing chicken fingers, Texas toast, fries and slaw, served in a handful of ways. I recall that if you stopped at the Guthrie’s on Baxter Hill, you could get them in a plate, in a box, in a smaller size without slaw or between two slices of bread. Those were your only options. They were absolutely essential to the dorm dining experience. Everybody who lived in the high-rise dorms had Guthrie’s all the time and those of us by the stadium regularly; so did thousands of tailgaters and high school students. The line out the door whenever Clarke Central was playing at home in the fall was every bit as insane on a Friday as on a UGA game day.

That Guthrie’s was the third in the chain, which is quite successful today in its home state of Alabama, with scattered outposts in other Southern states. In the early nineties, Guthrie’s opened a second Athens store, over by Cedar Shoals High School, so their students could enjoy the same Friday night craziness. This was a hugely important Athens tradition in the 1980s and 1990s, and its simplicity fueled wonderful urban legends. Some said there was a secret menu, and some said that if you left a penny in the sauce – a sort of peppery brown mayo, totally delicious – overnight, you could retrieve it polished and glittering.

Then one day in the late ’90s, the Athens locations were gone. It was very abrupt and their departure fueled a whole new raft of urban legends, which I’ll decline to repeat in these pages. Some stories are best left unreported, if unconfirmed. Talk radio should try that sometime.

Several years later, Guthrie’s returned ever-so-briefly to the Athens region, opening a store twenty-ish miles north in Danielsville. It’s gone now, but there are two stores in the Atlanta area along with the twenty-ish restaurants in Alabama and six in other states. I was working in the Ravinia building when the Dunwoody store opened in 2004 and a co-worker mentioned it. She thought, wrongly, that it was a Zaxby’s knockoff. I let her know it was the other way around, but you can bet that Guthrie’s glacier-like speed at expanding is going to run into that everywhere. If they try moving into Louisiana, they’ll be called a Raising Cane’s clone.

Guthrie’s is an occasional destination for us, whenever we need a quick meal on the top end of I-285 while going out of town through Spaghetti Junction. On Friday, Marie and I had hoped to get lunch further up the road as we started an anniversary getaway, but trouble leaving work early meant that we didn’t get on the perimeter until after the lunch rush had already ended, and the Spaghetti Junction backup already showing signs of starting. (You’ll notice I don’t say who had trouble leaving early. Maybe I’m polite, or maybe I just don’t want you to think ill of me.) This store has expanded their menu just a little, adding wings and breakfast to their offerings, but what they need to do is hire somebody to straighten that place up some. Nobody ever stopped at Guthrie’s wanting cleanliness – that Baxter Hill store looked like a war zone from sunup to sundown – but I’m starting to get at the age where I want somebody to get out from behind the counter and wipe down dirty tables.

Then again, it’s not like this is haute cuisine; it’s finger-gooping greasy fried chicken fingers, done right. You remember how one day you went through a Zaxby’s drive-thru and didn’t have to wait for your food and the sauce came prepackaged in a factory-made plastic cube with the ingredients on the label? Guthrie’s reminds you of the days before Zaxby’s got corporate enough to change into that. Or, if you will, the days before there was a Zaxby’s. I hope that they’re always around, somewhere, and that there will always be people who will spread the word that theirs was the better restaurant, first.

Now if only I could convince Guthrie’s to serve up those fried mushrooms and Fanta Cherry that their imitator has. Don’t you judge me.